The Core Knowledge Blog

Struggling seventh graders did significantly better in school after a series of self-affirming, 15-minute writing assignments according to research published in the journal Science.  As PBS’s Newshour tells it,  Geoffrey Cohen, a social psychologist at the University of Colorado studied 400 seventh-grade students at a suburban public school in Connecticut.  They asked half of the students “to complete a self-affirming exercise: to choose from a list of values — such as relationships with friends and family, athletic ability and smarts — and write about the value most important to them.”

In the new study, Cohen and his colleagues tracked the students until the end of eighth grade. They found that the benefits for low-achieving black students continued for the entire two years — students who completed the self-affirmation exercise raised their GPA by four-tenths of a point compared to the control group. They were also less likely to need remedial work or to repeat a grade — 5 percent as compared to 18 percent of the control group. The intervention continued to have no effect on white students and high-achieving black students.

“A difference of a third or more on G.P.A. is a large effect, and what’s surprising is that there was apparently no fadeout of the effect,” Greg Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the research, tells the New York Times. “Fadeout is the coin of the realm in school intervention studies.”

The Times points out that those who benefited were still barely getting C’s, on average, by the end of middle school.

(HT: Russo)